This City Is Ours review – the Liverpudlian gang drama is back … and the acting’s as terrific as ever

Just when we thought we were out, they pull us back in. Seventeen months after it huffed off in its Toyota Omertà, This City is Ours is back for a second series of high-stakes gangland bastardry. Which means, all things being equal, or at least Liverpudlian, we can expect more of the following: convoluted drug deals conducted over congealing ragu; shouting; tiny-skulled henchmen with chests of astonishing bulbosity, as if someone had squeezed their legs like tubes of toothpaste and all the meat had been forced up to their armpits; beards. So yes, it’s back. Go tell it on the mountain. And bring a shovel while you’re at it. A shovel? Yes, a shovel. Now stop asking questions and start digging; this corpse won’t disappear by itself.

“’Ee’s gone,” whimpers Cheryl (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), blinking weepily in the Marbella sunshine as troubled mobster Michael (James Nelson-Joyce) manoeuvres the decomposing remains of her late husband into a makeshift grave. And ‘ee has. Gone that is. Poor Davy (Stephen Walters). Shot by erratic kingpin Ronnie Phelan (Sean Bean) for leaking information about a drug deal, his life snuffed out like a heavily discounted Yankee Candle. Davy is now, alas, gravy.

Michael, you may remember, took umbrage at the murder and, fearing for his position in the Phelan family’s crime empire, promptly plunged a kitchen knife into Ronnie’s pyjamas. Now here we are in series two, with the haunted, ferrety Michael attempting to “go straight” on the Costa del Carcass with only his conscience for company. But needs must and all that, and so we gather to clear up the crime scene with only Michael, Cheryl, Michael’s preoccupied wife, Diana (Hannah Onslow), and several thousand blowflies for company. Oh, and Felipe (Álvaro Morte), a sockless snarler who promptly kidnaps them all at gunpoint and locks them up in his swanky poolside lair (“I hem yor fokin’ host”).

¿Por qué? Because he’s the younger brother of Ricardo – the cartel honcho who was, until he was run over at the end of the first series, the Phelans’ main supplier of cocaine and empty threats. Felipe wants to know who “fockin’ killed” his sibling and will not rest until he learns the “fockin’ truth!”

Felipe looks like Craig Revel Horwood and is “strictly” surrounded by silent goons in black athleisurewear who stand with their legs so far apart they could be deployed as spirit levels. Good news for any unfinished shelving in the vicinity, but less encouraging for Cheryl and Diana, who learn they will be held captive by these lunks until Michael returns from “fockin’ Leeverpole” with the name of Ricardo’s murderer. Oh ño.

The acting is, as always, terrific. Not least from Shaun “Endeavour” Evans as newcomer Ozzie Thompson, a sublimely chilly old lag who keeps asking questions about Ronnie while drifting around the Phelans like the Ghost of Bastards Past. And dear God, the tension. There’s a scene in a car wash that is so exquisitely palpitation-inducing it took me three attempts to get through the whole thing, and that was with a packet of digestives. (Frankly, the idea of approaching any of this without sufficient carbohydrates doesn’t bear thinking about.)

This City is Ours is not The Gentlemen, with its preening toffs and their fists of dry-cured Ibérico ham. Nor is it MobLand with its showboating Oirish grifters. Nobody swaggers around Stephen Butchard’s mob saga in jeggings, or is hurled in slow-motion through a pub thick with whooping cockneys in flat caps. These tortured, blouson-wearing Liverpudlians are not, by any stretch of the imagination, “cool”. They are misguided dolts, mawkish bruisers or ambitious berks so flummoxed by the demands of everyday life that their chances of sustained gangland domination seem … slim. And so we get Michael fretting about his wife’s IVF injections and hapless, Ricardo-flattening Banksey (Mike Noble) reminding his teenage son to empty the cat’s litter tray. We get weary matriarch Elaine (Julie Graham) clearing her throat at Ronnie’s graveside while surrounded by wilting petrol-station daffodils and a heartbreakingly naff A3 photograph of her dead husband, his laughing face already bleached by the unforgiving Liverpool sun. Brief rays of tender, quotidian rubbishness that have the curious effect of making this ambitious crime drama as lovable as it is bloody. More power to its fockin’ elbow.